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Talk:BETA/@comment-5806305-20150625114310/@comment-4391208-20150626181709
I thought we were just talking about the "skin", aka bark-covered areas? I left leaves out because they were considered specialized organs. lol. But yes, I did miss it. With regards to information sharing, the series does show that despite the protracted war on Earth, at no time do the lunar BETA attempt some mass landfall effort. Either they have not finished mining the moon (not a very sound point, given that they had two Hive units hot on the heels of the retreating humans a short period after the total retreat) or they only launch a pre-determined number of Hive units upon finding suitable planets. While it could be argued that the Athabasca BETA didn't develop Laser-class because the Kashgar Hive had not matured enough to begin interplanetary dialogue, surely, if regular communication was widespread amongst Hive command units, then adaptation to human forces would have been much quicker than simply using Laser-class as impromptu anti-air. Yuuko noted as much during the Defence of Yokohama Base that the Sadogashima BETA had tunneled so far underneath Japan that they could have simply bypassed the coastal fleets and second defense line divisions to directly hit Yokohama Base, which is what they did in the end. Adaptation is not really an issue for the BETA considering the surprises they keep springing up on the human forces in Alt. and TE; the issue is that they seem to be incredibly slow in reacting to what should be catastrophic losses to their population power. Most fans like to think that humanity held out well for 30 years, but if you think about it, if the BETA are that restricted in their operating (eg. no constant, reliable contact with senior Hives, eg. from Kashgar to lunar Hives), if each Hive dropped from onto a planet only has "mine and send" as its preinstalled commands and nothing else, it would explain that they would have to re-learn everything, including plans in case their mining operations are severely disrupted, from scratch, by interacting with their environment. So humanity didn't really hold out well, rather, the BETA are "prevented" from using "items and stats" (aka combat experience) saved over from their previous playthrough of the mining game (on another planet, or any one planet in the past that also had sentient life). Going by this, every Hive dropped into a non-standard world, like an ocean planet, would have to "re-reseach" the required traits of oceangoing BETA; eg. you could have one Hive that adopted serpentine designs and another that used behemoths that looked like they were ripped straight out of Darius, despite both Hives settling in on what are essentially similarly-arranged biomes. Little attributes like liquid viscosity, type, density, and other details could result in an infinite number of forms for adapted BETA. The lack of past experience and fully-creative sentience would also be a reasonable genetic fail-safe built into their biocode by the Creators (to prevent the rise of not!Tyranids in case they rebelled against the Creators, although by that point they should be already operating with kid gloves off, or perhaps as a limiter to prevent them from destroying potentially sentient natural races that could rise and adapt to defeat them, as wildly irresponsible as that sounds; but then again creating an autonomous mining race that requires opponents to have basic mastery of universal physics and intersystem spacefaring technology to reliably defeat is about as irresponsible as one can get, considering that planets out there are not inclined to make things easier for whatever is already living on them), but at this point I'm just shooting air with my guesses.